Last Tuesday, a group of Holocaust survivors, by now gaunt and frail, made their way back to Auschwitz, the West’s symbol of evil—back to the slave-labor side of the vast complex, with its mocking inscription Arbeit Macht Frei (“Work makes you free”), and back to the death camp, where a million and a quarter human beings, most of them Jews, were gassed, burned and turned to ash. They were there to commemorate the day, 70 years ago, when Soviet troops liberated Auschwitz and saw, for the first time, the true dimensions of the greatest crime since human beings first set foot on Earth.

The moment would have been emotional at the best of times, but this year brought an especially disturbing undercurrent. The Book of Genesis says that, when God told Abraham what would happen to his descendants, a “fear of great darkness” fell over him. Something of that fear haunted the survivors this week, who have witnessed the return of anti-Semitism to Europe after 70 years of political leaders constant avowals of “Never again.” As they finished saying Kaddish, the Jewish prayer for mourners, one man cried out, “I don’t want to come here again.” Everyone knew what he meant. For once, the fear was not only about the past but also about the future.

The murder of Jewish shoppers at a Parisian kosher supermarket three weeks ago, after the killing of 12 people at the offices of the satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, sent shivers down the spines of many Jews, not because it was the first such event but because it has become part of a pattern. In 2014, three visitors were killed at the Jewish museum in Brussels. In 2012, a rabbi and three young children were murdered at a Jewish school in Toulouse. In 2008 in Mumbai, four terrorists separated themselves from a larger group killing people in the city’s cafes and hotels and made their way to a small Orthodox Jewish center, where they murdered its young rabbi and his pregnant wife after torturing and mutilating them. As the Sunday Times of London reported about the attack, “the terrorists would be told by their handlers in Pakistan that the lives of Jews were worth 50 times those of non-Jews.”Two Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death by the sword as revenge for the death of Jesus, who looks on at top left. Manuscript illumination, c1250, from a French Bible. ENLARGETwo Jews, kneeling at right, about to be put to death by the sword as revenge for the death of Jesus, who looks on at top left. Manuscript illumination, c1250, from a French Bible. Photo: The Granger Collection

An ancient hatred has been reborn.

Some politicians around the world deny that what is happening in Europe is anti-Semitism. It is, they say, merely a reaction to the actions of the state of Israel, to the continuing conflict with the Palestinians. But the policies of the state of Israel are not made in kosher supermarkets in Paris or in Jewish cultural institutions in Brussels and Mumbai. The targets in these cities were not Israeli. They were Jewish.Advertisement

According to the Middle East Media Research Institute, an Egyptian cleric, Muhammad Hussein Yaqub, speaking in January 2009 on Al Rahma, a popular religious TV station in Egypt, made the contours of the new hate impeccably clear: “If the Jews left Palestine to us, would we start loving them? Of course not. We will never love them…They are enemies not because they occupied Palestine. They would have been enemies even if they did not occupy a thing…You must believe that we will fight, defeat and annihilate them until not a single Jew remains on the face of the Earth…You will not survive as long as a single one of us remains.”

Not everyone would put it so forcefully, but this is the hate in which much of the Middle East and the Muslim world has been awash for decades, and it is now seeping back into Europe. For Jews, “never again” has become “ever again.”

The scope of the problem is, of course, difficult to gauge precisely. But recent polling is suggestive—and alarming. An Anti-Defamation League study released last May found “persistent and pervasive” anti-Jewish attitudes after surveying 53,100 adults in 102 countries and territories world-wide. The ADL found that 75% of Muslims in the Middle East and North Africa held anti-Semitic attitudes; the number was 24% in Western Europe, 34% in Eastern Europe and 19% in the Americas.

Or consider a 2011 Pew Research Center study, which found that favorable views of Jews were “uniformly low” in predominantly Muslim regions that it surveyed: 4% in Turkey and the Palestinian territories, 3% in Lebanon, and 2% in Egypt, Jordan and Pakistan.

At this juncture in the history of hate, we must remember what anti-Semitism is. It is only contingently, even accidentally, about Jews. Jews die from it, but they are not its only victims. Today Christian communities are being ravaged, terrorized and decimated throughout the Middle East, sub-Saharan Africa and parts of Asia, and scores of Muslims are killed every day by their brothers, with Sunnis arrayed against Shiites, radicals against moderates, the religious against the secular. The hate that begins with Jews never ends with Jews.A copy of Adolf Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’ is sold at a street shop in Cairo in 2009. ENLARGEA copy of Adolf Hitler's ‘Mein Kampf’ is sold at a street shop in Cairo in 2009. Photo: Agence France-Pesse/Getty Images

Anti-Semitism has existed for a very long time. One critical moment came around the end of the 1st century C.E., when the Gospel of John attributed to Jesus these words about the Jews: “You belong to your father, the Devil.” From being the children of Abraham, Jews had been transformed into the children of Satan.

But it took a millennium for this text to spark widespread violence against Jews. That came in 1095, when Pope Urban II delivered his call for the First Crusade. A year later, some Crusaders, on their way to “liberate” the holy city of Jerusalem, paused to massacre Jewish communities in Northern Europe, in Cologne, Worms and Mainz. Thousands died. Many Jews committed suicide rather than submit to the mob and forcible conversion to Christianity. It was a traumatizing moment for European Jewry—and the portent of worse to come.

From the time of the Crusades onward, Jews in Christian Europe began to be seen not as human beings but as a malevolent force, a demonic and destructive power that mysteriously yet actively sought the harm of others. Jews were accused of desecrating the sacramental bread used in communion, poisoning wells and spreading the plague. They were held responsible for the Black Death, the epidemic that in the 14th century cost millions of lives. They lived in fear.

This period added to the repressive vocabulary of the medieval West such terms as book burning, forced conversion, Inquisition, auto-da-fe, expulsion, ghetto and pogrom. In duration and intensity, it ranks among the most sustained chronicles of enmity in history. What had happened to activate a hate that had been incubating for 10 centuries, since Christianity emerged from Judaism?

The same question could be asked about Nazi Germany. Had someone been asked in the 1890s to identify the epicenters of anti-Semitism in Europe, the answers would probably have been Paris (where Alfred Dreyfus, a French military office of Jewish descent, was framed as a spy and unjustly imprisoned) and Vienna (whose bigoted mayor, Karl Lueger, became Hitler’s inspiration and role model). Why was it Germany that conceived and executed the Final Solution, an elaborate program with the sole purpose of exterminating Europe’s Jews?

The answer is the same in both cases: Anti-Semitism becomes deadly only when a culture, nation or faith suffers from a cognitive dissonance so profound that it becomes unbearable. It happens when the way a group sees itself is contradicted by the way it is seen by the world. It is the symptom of an unendurable sense of humiliation.

Christianity, which had been transformed by the conversion of the Roman Emperor Constantine in the fourth century, found itself overtaken by Islam by the 11th century. Germany, which had seen itself as the supreme nation in Europe, was defeated in World War I and then punished under the Treaty of Versailles.

These humiliations resulted not in introspection but in a search for foreign culprits—for external enemies who could be blamed and destroyed. The parallel in Islam over the past century was the defeat and dissolution of its one remaining bastion of imperial power, the Ottoman Empire, in 1922. Six years later, radical political Islam was born in Egypt in the form of the Muslim Brotherhood.In 2009, the entrance of a synagogue in Lille, northern France, was defaced with graffiti referring to the supposed ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ that many anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim controls the government, finance and the media. ENLARGEIn 2009, the entrance of a synagogue in Lille, northern France, was defaced with graffiti referring to the supposed ‘Zionist Occupation Government’ that many anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists claim controls the government, finance and the media. Photo: agence France-Pesse/Getty Images

Hate cultivated for such cultural and political ends resolves the dissonance between past glory and current ignominy. By turning the question “What did we do wrong?” into “Who did this to us?”, it restores some measure of self-respect and provides a course of action. In psychiatry, the clinical terms for this process are splitting and projection; it allows people to define themselves as victims.

The question then becomes: victims of whom? There were many possibilities. Between the 15th and 18th centuries, Europe blamed witches and killed some 40,000 of them, according to the British historian Ronald Hutton. But Europe’s problems remained. For two millennia, another candidate also has been available: the Jews.

Despite what some intemperate voices claim, anti-Semitism has no genuine provenance within Islam. The historian Bernard Lewis used to draw a wry distinction: Islam has traditionally had contempt for the Jews, he would say, not hate—adding, “From contempt you don’t die. From hate you do.” Anti-Semitism entered Islam from the outside, in the form of two classic myths imported from Europe.

The first was the blood libel, the mad idea that Jews kill Christian children to use their blood to make matzo, the unleavened bread eaten during Passover. The idea is absurd, not least because even the tiniest speck of blood in food renders it inedible in Jewish law. The libel was an English invention, born in Norwich around 1144, and was unsuccessfully condemned by several popes. It was introduced into the Middle East by Christians in the 19th century, leading to trials of innocent Jews in Lebanon and Egypt and, most famously, in Damascus in 1840.

The blood libel is still in circulation. In 1983, Syrian Defense Minister Mustafa Tlass embraced it in his book, “The Matzo of Zion,” according to scholars like Stephen Eric Bonner and Anthony Julius. In 1991, according to the Jewish Telegraphic Agency, the Syrian delegate to the U.N. Human Rights Commission praised this “valuable book,” saying it “unmasked the racist character of Zionism.”More Saturday Essays

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“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion”—a late 19th-century forgery about a supposed global Jewish conspiracy, produced by members of the czar’s secret police and exposed as a fiction by the Times of London as early as 1921—become one of Hitler’s favorite texts. In Nazi Germany, it became, as the historian Norman Cohn put it, a “warrant for genocide.” The “Protocols” were introduced into the Middle East in Arabic translation in the 1930s by, among others, the grand mufti of Jerusalem, Hajj Amin al-Husayni, who spent World War II in Berlin, producing Arabic broadcasts for the Nazis.

“The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” continues to be reprinted and widely read. In 2002, a 41-part dramatic series called “Horseman Without a Horse,” which the Anti-Defamation League reported “portrays the ‘Protocols’ as historical fact,” was shown on Egyptian television during Ramadan. In 2003, a similar series called “Diaspora” was shown on a Lebanon-based satellite television network owned by the terrorist organization Hezbollah, also according to the Anti-Defamation League. The 1988 charter of the Palestinian Islamist group Hamas warns that the Zionists’ “plan is embodied in the ‘Protocols of the Elders of Zion,’ and their present conduct is the best proof of what we are saying.”

Tragically, Europe, having largely cured itself of anti-Semitism, now finds it returning, carried by the very cultures that Europe itself infected with the virus. Fortunately, there are young Muslims, some of them ex-radicals, who are working for a more tolerant Islam, and in organizations such as the Coexist Foundation and New York University’s Of Many Institute, you find Jews and Muslims fighting anti-Semitism and Islamophobia together.

The real tragedy would be if the West continued to see anti-Semitism as a strictly Jewish problem. It isn’t. Jews die from it, but it isn’t about Jews.

The blood libel was the creation of Christians who believed in the Eucharist and feared that the power of the sacraments and the Church were slipping away. The “Protocols” were a fabrication of Russian czarists, dreaming of empire and glory while fearing that their world was about to be shattered by revolution. To understand hate, it is crucial to examine the hater, not the hated.

Judeophobia in the Middle Ages led Christians to defeat in the Crusades. Anti-Semitism led Germany to self-destruction and moral shame. Today, anti-Semitism is a key ingredient in the poisonous mix of ideas that has turned so much of the Middle East into a cruel state of nature, a war of “every man against every man,” as Thomas Hobbes memorably described it. Hate harms the hated, but it destroys the hater.

A passage in Deuteronomy has momentous modern-day implications. Moses, nearing the end of his life, is addressing the next generation of Israelites, the people who will cross the Jordan River and enter the Promised Land. “Do not hate an Egyptian,” he tells them, “for you were a stranger in his land.”

This is one of the most counterintuitive verses in the Bible. The Egyptians had enslaved the Israelites and planned a slow genocide against them. Was this not a reason to hate them?

But Moses’ words are among history’s wisest political insights. If the Israelites had continued to hate their erstwhile persecutors, Moses might have succeeded in leading them out of Egypt, but he would have failed in taking Egypt out of them. The Israelites would still have been slaves: to their memories and resentments, their sense of humiliation—slaves, in short, to the past. To be free, you have to let go of hate. You have to stop seeing yourself as a victim—or else you will succeed only in making more victims.

Judaism, Christianity and Islam are religions of love, not of hate. We must listen and heed the survivor in Auschwitz this week when he said, “I don’t want to be here again”—for that is the end of the road that begins in hate. All of us—Jews, Christians and Muslims, brothers and sisters in Abraham’s family—must choose another way.Popular on WSJ

PARIS—France’s top leaders rushed Monday to reassure the country’s Jews about their safety after a Jewish graveyard in eastern France was desecrated and a gunman in Copenhagen targeted a synagogue, a month after deadly attacks in Paris.

Prime Minister Manuel Valls called for France to unite against “Islamo-fascism,” and reaffirmed his call for French Jews to stay in France, even amid encouragement from Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for European Jews to move to Israel. ("Islamo Fascism"? Nice to see the term I repeated have suggested here over the years to be coming into accepted usage.)

“France is injured as you are and France doesn't want you to leave,” Mr. Valls told French radio, in what he described as a message to French Jews. “France once again expresses its love for you, its support and solidarity.”

France is grappling with a growing sense of insecurity among its Jewish community, who feel threatened by a rise of anti-Semitic attacks.

The graveyard vandalism left around 300 out of 400 tombstones knocked down and spray-painted in Sarre-Union, a town near the French-German border. The incident came just over a month after a gunman killed four Jews in a kosher supermarket in Paris, part of a three-day spree of violence that left 17 people dead. Over the weekend, Jewish fears were further fanned when a lone gunman in Copenhagen killed a 37 year-old Jewish man who was guarding the door of a bat mitzvah ceremony in a parish hall.

Danish police said they shot and killed the gunman, a day after he also attacked a seminar on free speech that featured a Swedish cartoonist who has lampooned Islam.

‘France is injured as you are and France doesn't want you to leave.’ —French Prime Minister Manuel Valls

Since the January attacks, France has tightened security at Jewish institutions, posting police and soldiers outside Jewish schools, community centers and places of worship. The community, which is already on edge, was further rattled after a man wielding a knife attacked soldiers guarding a Jewish center in the southern French city of Nice earlier this month.

France has the world’s third-largest Jewish population after Israel and the U.S., according to most estimates, but many French Jews have been moving to Israel, citing fears about their security at home.France’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls--pictured here, second from right, with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders from the Paris suburb of Evry earlier this month--has vowed to ensure the protection of the country’s Jews after the desecration of a Jewish cemetery at the weekend. ENLARGEFrance’s Prime Minister Manuel Valls--pictured here, second from right, with Muslim, Jewish and Christian leaders from the Paris suburb of Evry earlier this month--has vowed to ensure the protection of the country’s Jews after the desecration of a Jewish cemetery at the weekend. Photo: Agence France-Presse/Getty Images

Anti-Semitic attacks have been on the rise in France. In 2013, the latest year for which data have been compiled, there were 423 reported anti-Semitic incidents in France, compared with 82 in 1999, according to the Jewish Community Security Service, a body that compiles data based on police reports.

Around 6,900 French Jews moved to Israel in 2014, up from 3,300, according to the Jewish Agency for Israel, an Israeli organization that oversees the immigration process. The number is expected to grow to 10,000 in 2015, the agency said in January after the Paris attacks.

President François Hollande also sought to stem the tide. “I won’t allow words spoken in Israel that allow people to think that Jews don’t have their place in Europe and, in particular, in France,” he said earlier Monday. Mr. Hollande is scheduled to visit the cemetery on Tuesday.

"Who are committing these acts? While some are nativists, neo-Nazis and skinheads, many others are religious extremists radicalized by those who distort Islam to fit their intolerant agendas. All are deeply hostile to pluralism and democratic liberties."

No rocket science here. Muslims around the world hate Jews. More Muslims in Europe. More Jew haters in Europe.

Lets see the last time I thought about it 1 + 1 = 2.

"radicalized by those who distort Islam." What is this BS? It IS right in the Koran to kill or convert infadels. This is not a distortion of Islam. It is Islam.

For God's sake. Stop the ridiculous dance around the truth. They want to 'f' kill us.

I don't know which thread this should go under. Recognizing past discriminations is fine but I don't get apologizing for the discriminations done by others. In all my life I cannot recall any significant discrimination because I am Jewish. Not one time. Of course if this guy wants to pay me some reparations because of abuse of Jews by other people to other people I guess I could accept a check:

I never thought I'd be complementing Larry King - frankly I'm shocked he agreed to have David on his show - but this is a good interview which gives you insight into David's background and his current campaign against Jew-hatred on college campuses.

Among those who don’t attend religious services, approval of Obama stood at 58 percent to 38 percent.

There are really two Jewish votes; the religious Jewish vote and the secular Jewish vote.

Something similar happens when we break down Obama’s approval ratings [4] by church attendance. Among those who attend church weekly, Obama’s approval ratings hover between 39 percent and 46 percent. Among those who never attend church, between 53 to 57 percent approve of Obama.

These numbers come from a Gallup poll taken [2] this year that did what few polls of American Jews do in breaking down the seemingly monolithic vote to find some interesting things. The most interesting thing is that the Jewish vote is more demographically out of step with Americans than politically out of step.

When we break it down by behaviors and beliefs, the Jewish vote is not that different than the overall American vote. What is different is the balance of behaviors and beliefs in the Jewish community.

Only 11 percent of American Jews attend religious services weekly. Among Americans in general, it’s over 40 percent.

Recently I noted that American Jews had become a liberal outlier [5] globally as Jews in the UK, Canada, Israel and Australia were voting conservative. And Jewish communities in those countries also tend to be relatively more traditional and religious than in the United States.

UK Jews are more than [6] twice as likely to attend synagogue services weekly as American Jews.

63 percent of Israeli Jews “believe completely” that there is a G-d while only 34 percent of American Jews are certain that they believe in G-d, a universal spirit or something. 63 percent of Israeli Jews keep Kosher as do 52 percent of UK Jews and 22 percent of American Jews. Intermarriage is at 44 percent among American Jews, 26 percent among UK Jews and negligible among Israeli Jews.

The political left with its messianic obsessions, environmental apocalypses and fanatical devotion to the cause occupies a space traditionally filled by religion.

When religion leaves, other things replace it instead. The Jewish left is the hole left by the absence of Judaism and any meaningful Jewish historical, national and cultural identity.

When asked what it means to be Jewish, 56 percent of American Jews mentioned social justice, 42 percent mentioned comedy and only 43 percent mentioned Israel. 28 percent mentioned being part of a Jewish community. Only 19 percent mentioned anything involving religion.

People with Jewish last names for whom being Jewish is leftist politics and a joke should not be expected to care about Israel. If being Jewish means nothing to them, why would the Jewish State?

However among UK Jews, 61 percent listed Jewish peoplehood, 40 percent mentioned social justice, 38 percent listed religion and 36 percent mentioned the Sabbath. Those are still poor numbers, but they explain why the UK Jewish community is politically healthier and saner than its American cousins.

The political results of that difference in worldviews expressed itself when 70 percent of UK Jews [7] voted conservative while 69 percent of Jews [8] voted for Obama. (Down to 61 percent Democrat [8] affiliation this year.)

It’s all a question of whether you think being Jewish means being part of a community, a nation and a religion… or laughing at Jon Stewart’s jokes.

Religion is a significant predictor of political orientation, but it’s not the only significant factor.

Obama’s biggest base of support is among Jewish college graduates. That’s where he enjoys a 54 to 43 percent approval rating. Among post-graduates that climbs to 62 percent against 36 percent.

That’s not too radically different from the overall Obama approval ratings for college graduates in the general population which has hovered between 53 percent and 46 percent [4].

Among Jews with only a high school diploma or less, 53 percent disapproved of Obama while only 39 percent approved. These numbers are far more negative on Obama than the national average, but those numbers are skewed by a disproportionate share of minority supporters in that category.

If Jews had the same percentage of college grads and post-grads as the rest of the country, the Jewish vote might be conservative. But while 29 percent of adults overall have a college degree and 10 percent have a post-graduate degree, 58 percent of Jews have a college degree and 28 percent have a post-graduate degree. The fundamental difference here isn’t so much political as demographic.

The problem with American Jews is an internal imbalance in which higher education has displaced traditional Jewish learning and the ideals of social justice have displaced Judaism. Jewish culture has been reduced to neurotic self-mockery and hipster knowingness.

This isn’t a purely Jewish problem. It’s a situation that exists among some non-Jewish elites whose Christianity doesn’t venture beyond social justice and whose identity is making fun of their own ‘whiteness’. It’s worse among Jews because a higher percentage of them live and think this way.

American Jews are more dysfunctional than Jews in the UK or Israel, because their leaders more enthusiastically adopted the worldview of the liberal Protestants they were trying to imitate.

The fight against slavery and then for civil rights that came to religiously define some liberal Protestant churches also became the closest thing to religion for liberal Jewish denominations. Abraham Joshua Heschel marching at Selma was a defining spiritual experience for them, incessantly referenced, but incapable of being repeated. It was a theology that depended on the vicarious experience of the otherness of others. Like their liberal Protestant cousins, a secular religious movement was desperately drawing on the religious tradition of another group of people while making oppression into their faith.

British Jews are rediscovering their religion and the focus on social justice is plummeting for those under 40. But British Jews never lost their sense of self to the same extent that American Jews did. That is why it will take more than the renewed threat to Israel to shift the American Jewish vote. Rising anti-Semitism on the left and the isolation of Jews in liberal spaces, on and off campus, will play its part as it has in Europe, but the European Jews have done a better job of holding on to what being Jewish means.

In both the UK and the US, the middle ground is vanishing with the secular social justice Jews leaving while the Orthodox population increases generationally. A third of Jewish children in the UK are being raised in Orthodox homes. New York City will have an Orthodox majority before too long.

An emerging Jewish conservative majority among American Jews will badly traumatize and infuriate a Jewish liberal consensus that views leftist politics as identity and religion. The fallout is already beginning and it will only get uglier. American Jewish leaders who want a united Jewish community will have to move to the middle. They will have to recognize that controversies such as the protests against UJA-Federation funding of anti-Israel groups [9] are a small taste of much larger things to come.

Jews around the world are living and voting conservative. American Jews may lose Woody Allen and Jon Stewart, but they will gain healthier communities and families. There will be fewer college graduates, but there will also be fewer screaming BDS activists smashing Jewish store windows. And American Jews will finally become part of the circle of Jewish communities around the world and in the Jewish State.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

Thanks for that post by Daniel Greenfield. I like the correlation to religious attendance and Jewish liberalism.Yet I don't know that this correlation totally explains the (IMHO crazy) fervor liberal Jews elevate the Democrat party agenda to the 10 Commandments, and perhaps Mr. Greenfield would agree with me that that is only part of the equation.

Jews were Democrats from day one in this country even when they were attending synagogue at higher rates. And prior to that they were disproportionately socialists in Europe were they migrated from.

I would also add my theory about the narcissism implicit among liberal Jews who view themselves as superior to others precisely because they hold their view of social justice as a great virtue. They are educated so they believe they are too smart for ancient religious theories and they are smart enough to *see past* ancient cultures. This use of the term 'tribalism' to describe all differences amongst peoples is an example. The concepts of country, of ethnicity, of nationalism, religion, social or economic class is all just a bunch of medieval nonsense that evolved before science showed we are nothing more than specks in a vast universe. They see beyond this. It is science that should determine our existence. Science above all that should determine rules, regulations, discourse, and social justice.

Liberal Jews are therefore better than those who 'cling' to such ancient concepts. They are more virtuous than others who fail to feel the pain of all the oppressed of the world. People who are not equally virtuous by their definition are just a bunch of primitive and ignorant people.

"People with Jewish last names for whom being Jewish is leftist politics and a joke"

Yes, The Democrat party is their new religion. It is ironic they cannot see they are even more intolerant, tyrannical, and enslaving by forcing everyone to agree with their view of the world. Those that don't like the world and their lives dominated by central socialist think tanks, like the Republican party, are the new Nazis.

"When religion leaves, other things replace it instead. The Jewish left is the hole left by the absence of Judaism and any meaningful Jewish historical, national and cultural identity."

Yes. And I don't think they even identify as Americans anymore. America is now a racist, too white, too large a gap between the rich and poor, too imperialistic.

Thus - the reason that American Jews voted overwhelmingly for Barack Obama in the last two elections - despite the damage he is clearly inflicting on the country. They share his communist view of America as a racist, bigoted, imperialist nation which needs to be cut down to size.

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"You have enemies? Good. That means that you have stood up for something, sometime in your life." - Winston Churchill.

PARIS—France’s National Front said Wednesday that 94% of party members wanted honorary chairman Jean-Marie Le Pen out of the party he helped found over four decades ago.

The French far-right party released the results of a partywide vote conducted earlier this month, weeks after Mr. Le Pen reiterated comments he made 25 years ago belittling the Holocaust. Of the total 51,552 party members, 28,664 participated in the vote, a spokesman said.

The vote has no legal value, as a French court recently ruled that the tally violated the party’s internal rules. Still, it could undermine Mr. Le Pen’s efforts to cling on to the party he put on the country’s political map. The release of the vote’s results, despite the court’s ruling, could also exacerbate tensions between Mr. Le Pen and his daughter, party leader Marine Le Pen, with whom he has been locked in a fierce battle for months over the future of the party.

“This massive vote shows the high level of confidence party members have for the National Front leadership,” the party spokesman said.

“I ask the National Front leaders to find the way back to reason and unity before it’s too late,” Mr. Le Pen said Wednesday.

Two months ago, a special committee of party members led by Ms. Le Pen proposed a vote to strip her father of his honorary chairman title, after he described gas chambers as a mere “detail” of World War II history in a media interview. Party members were invited to vote electronically by July 10.

But two days before the end of the vote, a French court suspended it, following a complaint filed by Mr. Le Pen. On Tuesday, an appeals court in Versailles, a suburb outside Paris, upheld the previous ruling and ordered the far-right party to pay Mr. Le Pen’s costs.Related

The National Front said it was “very surprised” by the court’s decision, which will allow Mr. Le Pen to keep a position that he “no longer deserves given his unspeakable behavior,” and that it would nevertheless release the vote’s results on Wednesday.